Cartography of Salt

The tide comes in like something remembered— a pressure behind the sternum, unnamed. You stand at the margin where water erases itself and begin to understand the usefulness of edges.

Every shore is a record of arrivals. The sand holds the shape of what passed through it, briefly, then gives the shape away— generous in the way only impermanence can be.

A gull pivots on nothing, adjusts, finds the column of warm air rising from asphalt somewhere inland. Even the birds know how to use the invisible.

The salt has been traveling since before the word for ocean. It has been in the throat of clouds, the locked white of ancient seabeds, your grandmother's kitchen in winter.

Now it settles on your lips— familiar and not yours, the way time moves through a body: always arriving, never staying, never gone.